NextPlay Careers
Product Overview
The transition of college and professional athletes into the working world, saying goodbye to a huge part of their identity, is a challenge that is often overlooked. It is a mentally draining process that athletes often go through themselves. The founder of NextPlay Careers is a former college coach who mentored many of his athletes through this process and dreamt of helping many more. He believes with technology, he can create a support network for athletes around the U.S. and help them succeed.
NextPlay Careers is a software suite that builds private digital communities for athletes to engage with career development content, build their network, and prepare for life after sports. Clients of NextPlay Careers include professional athletic teams (i.e. Los Angeles Rams) and college athletic programs (i.e. Duke, Stanford). Through the use of NextPlay software, athletic program directors can effectively foster an engaged alumni community, measure program impact and attract sponsorship opportunities.
Key Metrics
Went to market in 4 months with 6 white-labeled mobile applications
600+ users within 2 months of launch
13,000+ accrued annual interactions
My Role as NextPlay’s Product Manager
I worked directly with NextPlay’s founder and led a team of designer, web engineer and mobile app engineer to take NextPlay from ideation to launch, then through iterations. Within 4 months, we designed, developed and launched NextPlay’s product suite that includes:
Web application for NextPlay’s team to oversee and manage client platforms
Web application for NextPlay’s clients (i.e. athletic program director) to manage content, track engagement and facilitate connections
White labeled mobile application for athletes & alumni to connect, post and interact with professional development content and explore a career outside of professional sports
As the Product Manager of NextPlay, a young company at their seed capital round, I had to be efficient with resources. My primary objective was to curate a minimum viable product to explore product-market fit and acquire customer adoption. It was crucial for me to be aware of all the different user needs in the product suite, as the objectives of users of web application (program admins) and mobile applications (alumni & athletes) are different.
I frequently touched base with the founder to collect user and sales call feedbacks and utilized them to ideate features and prioritize short- and long-term product pipelines. I translated business objectives into technical requirements and explored ways to keep target users engaged and find value in our product.
My product team and I operated within an agile development framework with rapid turnarounds. I hosted daily standup meetings with engineers to resolve any issues they run into, and I ran weekly standup meetings with NextPlay’s founder for updates and product vision alignment. I developed user experience enhancements and designed wireframes such as the ones featured below:
